The present invention relates to a communications and more particularly to a processor-assisted system for allowing a handicapped person to more readily communicate with casual or untrained callers having an ordinary tone generating telephone.
Most people can use conventional telephones to communicate easily with others. Unfortunately, people with speech or hearing handicaps cannot, for the most part, make effective use of conventional telephones but must rely on special systems and devices.
One of the earliest systems required that each handicapped person have access to a terminal, such as a Teletype machine. While such systems were clearly useful, they did not have drawbacks. For two people to communicate, both had to have access to such systems and the training to know how to use them. These requirements obviously limited the number of people with whom a handicapped person could communicate.
It has been recognized that tone generating telephones could be used to allow people having such telephones to communicate with handicapped persons. Several techniques have been developed for allowing a telephone user to enter messages through the keypad of a standard tone generating telephone. While the techniques differ in detail, all require that the telephone user press several keys to identify which alphabetic letter he intends on the keypad. As an example, the "2" key on a standard telephone has "ABC" alphabetic characters and the user has to press several keys to indicate whether he intends an "A" or a "B" or a "C".
One of the known ways of doing this requires that the user depress the "1" or the "2" or the "3" key for a relatively long interval to indicate whether he intends the first or second or third alphabetic letter in a set. The user then depresses the key containing the appropriate set of alphabetic characters.
Another known technique requires that the user press the appropriate key one to three times quickly to identify which character on that key is intended.
While these and other known techniques accomplish the desired result of unambiguously identifying the alphabetic character intended if they are performed properly, they can only be used by those persons with some training and skill in the particular technique. Even then the techniques are more cumbersome than is desirable by virtue of the fact that multiple keystrokes are required for each alphabetic character.